Demographics - Mapping Pretrial Risk

Advocates of pretrial RATs promote them as more objective, and therefore less racially biased, than human judges or magistrates.

However, the use of RATs does not take bias out of the equation, and we cannot assume that using pretrial RATs will reduce incarceration or racial and economic disparities.

Several jurisdictions using RATs have not successfully reduced the racial disparities in their jails, and many more do not track any racial changes.

Many of the jurisdictions we interviewed did not explicitly connect using a risk assessment with reducing racial disparities in incarceration and supervision demographics in their jurisdictions. While some did say that they were aware of disproportionate racial populations in their jails and wanted to tackle this issue, others did not view their program or the RAT as tools to change jail demographics.

For example, our interviewee from Buncombe, North Carolina, acknowledged the racial disparities in their jail system and is working to address these disparities and implicit bias through trainings for judges and other decision-makers.¹ Our interviewee from Douglas County, Kansas, recognized that though they tried to keep the tool they developed race-neutral, even prior convictions can include racial bias. They are making efforts to address racial disparities in issues like traffic stops.²

Several other interviewed jurisdictions were trying to address racial disparities, account for bias, and study their own practices and tools as they relate to race, including Connecticut;³ Hennepin⁴ and Cass Counties, Minnesota;⁵ Santa Clara County, California;⁶ Nashville, Tennessee;⁷ and Saline County, Kansas.⁸

Some interviewees noted the complexity of understanding a tool’s full impact on different racial populations, and pointed out that the racial impact of a particular tool may vary between different jurisdictions using the same tool due to the way a tool is implemented on the ground.

However, interviewees from New Orleans, Louisiana;⁹ San Antonio, Texas;¹⁰ Shasta County, California;¹¹ Yakima County, Washington;¹² Mesa County, Colorado;¹³ and Armstrong County, Pennsylvania,¹⁴ stated that the pretrial assessment tool was not implemented to explicitly reduce racial disparity in pretrial incarceration. Some felt that race had nothing to do with assessment, or that because race was not an explicit input, the tool had no racial impact.

None of our interviewees could explicitly link the use of their RAT to a reduction in racial disparities in their jail or pretrial release rates. Many said they do not collect or could not tell us about the racial demographics of their jails at all.

Megan Stevenson’s report evaluating the impacts of risk assessment in Kentucky, an early adopter of a statewide pretrial RAT, found that using a risk assessment tool did not alter racial disparities in the pretrial population.¹⁵ Stevenson stated that the 2011 bail reform law mandating risk assessment “benefited white defendants more than Blacks” due to the way judges implemented the changes.¹⁶

In addition, before statewide implementation of risk assessment in Kentucky, the pretrial release rate without bail was roughly equal between Black and white defendants; after RATs became mandated in 2011, the release rate for white defendants was 10% higher than for Black defendants.¹⁷

In 2017, New Jersey began using the PSA statewide and completely reformed their money bail and pretrial systems. Although the overall jail population has decreased, “the racial and ethnic makeup within New Jersey’s jail population has remained largely the same.”¹⁸

Researchers studying the impact of the PSA in Mecklenburg, North Carolina, found that the PSA had no impact on racial disparities in their systems, and that Black individuals were more likely than others to be identified through the PSA as being high-risk.¹⁹

The Center for Court Innovation tested their tool for accuracy using New York City-based data in 2019.²⁰ The researchers found that 37% of Black and 29% of Latinx individuals were classified as moderate-high or high risk, compared to 18% of white individuals, and Black and Latinx individuals were more often incorrectly classified as higher risk than white individuals.

These researchers concluded that “pretrial risk assessment tools are likely to exhibit inequity – especially racial inequity,” often because using input data such as prior arrests is racially biased.²¹